It really depends on the question. Don't give me questions based on "unscramble" this word. But give me complicated math questions, complicated word questions, something where you actually apply problem solving abilities and I fly through those. Give me history questions or what does this word mean questions and its hit or miss as its based on knowledge, not actually figuring something out.

I worked at Texas Instruments and the best Technician called everything doodads, whatcha macallits, thingymagigys, etc. But he knew exactly how everything interacted and worked together, he just didn't have a clue what it was called. He was a back woods, swamp living, sensor type that was hard to understand because of his accent. Highly intelligent person, but his verbal skills, etc. were lacking. He was the type that would call in hung over instead of call in sick. But he ran circles around the people who worked for the company that built the machines. We are talking 30-120 million dollar photolithography machines, not some simple mechanical machine.

FWIW, I score very high on IQ tests and enjoy mensa workouts where you actually have to analyze and solve problems.

I would just say that just because of the way the tests are written would be the reason you see a gap between IQ scores of intuitives and sensors.

My brother, a likely ISTJ, is probably one of the smartest people I have ever really gotten to know IRL. He knows EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING. He has a magnificent fact recall and remembers pretty much everything ever said to him (which is a pain if you promise something and do not do it). He can spout out information before I am even through processing what is asked. Put both of us next to each other, and he comes off as probably 10x smarter than I do. Give us a puzzle/standardized test/riddle/board game and that changes. It does not mean that I am smarter or he is smarter, it just means that we are better at different things.

I do not really think that any one type is smarter or better than any other, and if I were to be honest it seems a bit elitist and blind to just disregard other types strengths. Sure categorize as you will, because averages are averages but you will find more intelligent and less intelligent members of any type, and it doesn't seem to me like you should just be able to pin on some sort of badge of intellectual honor just because you claim to identify a certain way.

Last edited by Frosty; 05-07-2015 at 12:54 AM.
Reason: Was going to add something from deleted post, decided against it.

I would just say that just because of the way the tests are written would be the reason you see a gap between IQ scores of intuitives and sensors.

My brother, a likely ISTJ, is probably one of the smartest people I have ever really gotten to know IRL. He knows EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING. He has a magnificent fact recall and remembers pretty much everything ever said to him (which is a pain if you promise something and do not do it). He can spout out information before I am even through processing what is asked. Put both of us next to each other, and he comes off as probably 10x smarter than I do. Give us a puzzle/standardized test/riddle/board game and that changes. It does not mean that I am smarter or he is smarter, it just means that we are better at different things.

I do not really think that any one type is smarter or better than any other, and if I were to be honest it seems a bit elitist and blind to just disregard other types strengths. Sure categorize as you will, because averages are averages but you will find more intelligent and less intelligent members of any type, and it doesn't seem to me like you should just be able to pin on some sort of badge of intellectual honor just because you claim to identify a certain way.

ISTJs are very good at details, they are very BOOK smart, but IMHO book smart is not intelligence, its knowledge. My knowledge is based on understanding how things work, not necessarily the details. For example, when I learn cars I learn how everything works together, I don't usually focus on the specs of each and every car. I generalize on that stuff because I don't have the memory to remember all that detail. I always have to look up the exact detail.

I think of intelligence more as

the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason; also : the skilled use of reason (2) : the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (as tests)

I don't see book smarts as intelligent, I see it as regurgitation and should be in a league of its own classification. Though I am highly intelligent(IQ in 150+ range) my memory is hit or miss and half of the time I have to utilize my intelligence to reverse engineer what other people remember. If it wasn't for my speed and processing power I would fall flat on my face in a lot of situations. I cant remember to do shit, but thankfully I can analyze and complete tasks so fast that its not an issue. I also think ahead so when my memory does cause issues I have already designed the possibility into the solution so it is more of a tweak of something as opposed to having to start fresh and new. I have relied very heavily on my intelligence just as he has probably relied very heavily on his memory.

I don't think intelligence is as big as people make it out to be, it is a single strength of many different strengths. I judge smart based on outcome, not necessarily a certain type of intelligence. Someone who is slower at processing, but still gets things right is just as smart as someone who can get the answer correct in a split second. I believe people have tried to add a bunch of different strengths into intelligence simply because people hold it above others and have tied it so closely to being smart.

I can’t agree that IQ level is completely useless and says nothing as it was told in this tread before .
I don’t understand this hate on IQ, probably people are taking it too personally. Of course as there are various brain abilities, IQ is only part of the bigger picture. I think it’s mostly based on analyzing details and abstract thinking so my guess would be that NT types would statistically have best scores. Probably Ti users, so INTPs and ENTPs.

But it’s only generalizing (maybe even stereotyping; there is a fine line between)because we are so different...

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes." A.C. Doyle

I don't see book smarts as intelligent, I see it as regurgitation and should be in a league of its own classification. Though I am highly intelligent(IQ in 150+ range) my memory is hit or miss and half of the time I have to utilize my intelligence to reverse engineer what other people remember. If it wasn't for my speed and processing power I would fall flat on my face in a lot of situations. I cant remember to do shit, but thankfully I can analyze and complete tasks so fast that its not an issue. I also think ahead so when my memory does cause issues I have already designed the possibility into the solution so it is more of a tweak of something as opposed to having to start fresh and new. I have relied very heavily on my intelligence just as he has probably relied very heavily on his memory.

I don't think intelligence is as big as people make it out to be, it is a single strength of many different strengths. I judge smart based on outcome, not necessarily a certain type of intelligence. Someone who is slower at processing, but still gets things right is just as smart as someone who can get the answer correct in a split second. I believe people have tried to add a bunch of different strengths into intelligence simply because people hold it above others and have tied it so closely to being smart.

Smart is completely independent of intelligence or IQ IMO.

I see your point, but is booksmart just the regurgitation of information? Or is it just learning from books? I mean yeah I hated those times in education where I was expected to just memorise and present what was essentially that exact information but used at 'the right time'. But information from books isn't just used in that one way, not even in education.

You can take information from all different sources and use it to come up with something new or create a new paradigm, theory, physical invention, technical...etc....so I think it's unfair to just label 'booksmart' as the regurgitation of information when that quite clearly isn't the case.

Application is important though and I am right behind the importance of where to apply as well as where you absorb. It's also readily apparent that there are so many different angles to intelligence that goes far beyond just academia. I personally think practical skills and applied experience, combined with genuinely learning from mistakes, is more important and useful than entirely abstract pursuits, but that is just personal.

Also I think your post is an interesting example of someone perhaps downplaying something he doesn't feel particularly attuned to. Well I feel similarly and it's those who show us up in areas that we are weaker who make us aware of them and that's important in itself. Although I'm not great at either book or street smarts by my own esteem.

This is perhaps a bit soppy and idealistic, but to me it would be great if we could move towards appreciation of those differences in attunement. I think that's part and parcel of typology as well and to stop us being so caught up in self-defence when we feel threatened. Certainly less snobbery in bookish areas might be nice.

'One of (Lucas) Cranach's masterpieces, discussed by (Joseph) Koerner, is in it's self-referentiality the perfect expression of left-hemisphere emptiness and a precursor of post-modernism. There is no longer anything to point to beyond, nothing Other, so it points pointlessly to itself.' - Iain McGilChrist

Suppose a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?"
"Suppose it didn't," said Pooh, after careful thought.
Piglet was comforted by this.
- A.A. Milne.

Is there any significant correlation? On average, who is the smartest type? For that matter, how do all the types rank? I've done some Google research, and all I've really found are two articles on it. Ironically, these two seem to suggest that Feeling and Intuitive types have higher I.Q.s. I find this kind of strange because I would imagine that Sensing and Thinking would make one smarter rather than going by one's emotions. Strange...

Generally, INTJs and INTPs score highest on IQ tests, but IQ has been proved almost useless as a measure of intelligence.

Granted, my ESFJ mother scored 140 on an IQ test, only seven points less than I did. It really surprised me, especially as she doesn't act like a person with a 140 IQ.

I disagree with INTJ being strategically the smartest. As a group they really don't seem all that smart to me, @uumlau is the exception. In this group on TypeC I would say that he is the only INTJ I would think is smart enough to actually strategize successfully. While INTJ may be the type to strategize the most, I would not include smart into that equation. I apologize if I offend other INTJs.

Funny things happen at the high end of the high IQ scale. Rather than using IQs, let me use percentiles.

The dynamic I see, for example, in the software field, is that you have a lot of people who are very smart, who are easily smarter than 95% of the people around them. I'm not even talking about IQ tests or anything like that: just normal everyday aptitude at work.

The problem I see is something I call "expert-itis". These really smart experts have simply never encountered anyone smarter than they are. Worse, at this high end of smarts, knowledge becomes very, very specialized. It is possible for two people to be experts in the "same field", and yet their knowledge barely overlaps. Part of the dynamic that occurs might be best represented by a Venn diagram. Two circles, each representing the sum total knowledge of each individual, each about the same size. The overlap of the two circles comprises about 10% of each individual's knowledge.

"Expert-itis" as I name it, is the phenomenon of two such individuals meeting, and as one sees that the other person only understands 10% of one's own knowledge, one assumes that the other person is a complete idiot.

The main reason that I see this dynamic fairly clearly is that, like you, I'm in that 150+ IQ range, easily 3 standard deviations above the norm (based on standardized tests, not IQ tests per se), around the 99.5% percentile. I routinely have people who barely understand what I do, who would quickly flunk out of the courses I took, treat me as a complete idiot, because I didn't know some dinky little detail that they consider to be all-important. Yet when push comes to shove, and we have to solve a real-life problem, I would often run into cases where I figure out the solution in 10 minutes, but I have to spend an hour or more "proving" my solution to people who haven't a clue what is going on, even though they are very (95th percentile) smart, and they think I'm an idiot because I don't know some dinky fact that they knew.

I see this same dynamic in people trying to determine how smart each MBTI type is. We understand our own kind of smarts better than others' versions of being really smart. The INTPs think the INTJs are all idiots. The INTJs think the INTPs are all idiots. The reality is that they all have "expert-itis": they see that small section of overlapping knowledge, but they DON'T see that other 90% of knowledge that is full of things they don't know, things that they don't even know that they should ask about.

I think that some of what you note about INTJs and myself is also part of that dynamic. I suspect you don't see the strengths in that INTJ thinking, because they aren't your strengths. You only see my strengths because I'm not merely INTJ, I'm an INTJ with a ton of education and several decades of real life experience backing it up, while a lot of these other INTJs are still just kids in college or barely out of college, still full of unrealistic expectations that were instilled by our kind of weird education system that doesn't actually teach you how to get and keep a job.

So, are INTJs the smartest strategic thinkers? It's definitely an aptitude or talent. And it's a kind of weird one, that looks especially stupid to Ti doms. Ti doms are thinking in terms of logic and logical consequences. INTJs (and Ni doms in general) don't think like that. Instead, they have a tool that is uniquely suited to strategy: an internal library of "how things work". While the topics might be logical/technical, the thought process is not. It's more a process of pattern-matching. If the pattern matches, or at least matches closely, the INTJ just pulls out the pattern, makes a couple of adjustments to handle special real-world cases they're aware of, and then applies it. This is great for strategy because if the facts on the ground change, one doesn't have to figure out the logic all over again (the typical Ti-dom thought process), one just looks for a new match (a very fast process) and works from there. A young INTJ has a much smaller library of such patterns, so the matching is going to be much broader, more naive, more likely to not account for everything and result in mistakes. An older INTJ with significant education and much experience in a specific field will have a very fine-tuned library of patterns. Also the older INTJ will have "meta-patterns", an ability to judge how well the pattern one has just matched might apply, an ability to judge others' levels of expertise and take advantage of them, and so on.

One of my longstanding questions about MBTI has been "what does a stupid INTJ look like?" and "what does does a smart ESFP look like?" I think I have answers for these. The stupid INTJ will still tend to score high on an IQ test, but will be kind of an idiot savant, unable to actually apply any of that knowledge in real life. The smart ESFP will be remarkably practical and high-achieving, yet not appear to be all that smart. ( Famous ESFPs - CelebrityTypes.com ) I bring this up because the real point isn't what type is smart or not, but how each type expresses its own intelligence and/or stupidity.

An argument is two people sharing their ignorance.

A discussion is two people sharing their understanding, even when they disagree.

Honestly, I don't think it has much to do with type. I'm ENFP and have an IQ of 133, my dad has an IQ of 134 and he's ISTJ, my INTJ best friend has an IQ of 139. My INFP mom shuns IQ tests as a matter of principle, haha, I think type probably has more impact on what type of smart you are rather than how smart.